Friday, July 31, 2009

I thought I'd do another one of these since the last one got such a good response. What was the song or artist that got you interested in electronic music in the first place?I'm still surprised with how vividly I remember mine. I was 8 years old and my family was visiting my aunt and uncle in the midwest. It was a fall day and my cousins and I were playing on their trampoline in the back yard. We had a radio playing some Top 40 type countdown show and this was the week that Gary Numan's "Cars" first charted in the US. When I first heard those Polymoog strings and the white noise clap sounds I froze and asked my cousins what instrument made that sound. They didn't know, and I wouldn't know until a few years later, all I knew is that whatever made those sounds was something I wanted to hear more of.Cut to almost 30 years later and now I make my living making electronic music. I often wonder how differently my life might have turned out if we hadn't had the radio turned on that day.

30 comments:

Steve
said...

Some time in the late 70's my dad's best childhood friend came to stay with us for a few weeks. As a thank you he gave my parents LP copies of Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene and Tomita's recording of Holst's "The Planets". Mom and Dad were not impressed, but my brother and I wore the grooves off of both records in about a month. While really liked the music, I didn't dig the long haired nerdy knob twiddling hobbit image that went with it at all.

A couple of years later there was a syndicated radio show called "Rock over London" that featured new wave music. I remember the first time I heard the DJ play Killing Joke's "The Wait" and the hair standing up on the back of neck. Even better, I remember the first time I saw a picture of Jaz Coleman's contorted warpainted face in Trouser Press magazine and thinking "finally- being keyboard player is *cool*."

You know I have spent much of my early life listening to alot of electronic music...but I never really differentiated it from any other type.

but I can say what began my love of it and complete understanding of practically my musical tastes was a listening to the mortal kombat soundtrack a million times...and trying to find artists like the ones on the album.....heh I can say I was about around the same age.....then again I did have a obesssion with "rhythm is a dancer" and "twilight zone remix" that predates my love of the MK soundtrack.

I had heard a lot of music with electronic components in it, but the first wholly electronic album I ever bought and heard was the first Excursions in Ambience compilation on Caroline/Astralwerks. The artist listing is a who's who of 1990 ambient house and led directly to my subsequent purchase of albums by FSOL, Higher Intelligence Agency, Ultramarine, Banco de Gaia and the Orb. You could do a lot worse than build an electronica collection around just those 5 artists!

Kraftwerk. Autobahn came out when I was in High School and actually got played on pop radio, in rotation with Stevie Wonder, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Alice Cooper and Foghat. That led to an obsession with finding other stuff in that vein like Tangerine Dream...

Not strictly 'electronic', but the first Roxy Music album, with Eno's contributions also made a big impression. That and the hippy dude who got a grant to bring an EMS Synthi into schools to talk about synthesizers.

Growing up behind the Iron curtain meant little to no chance of hearing Gary Numan on the radio. Most Western LPs were smuggled into the country and then taped until unlistenable condition, and nearly everything seemed exciting to me: Iron Maiden to Depeche Mode, Genesis to King Crimson, whatever there was. But I do remember the first time I felt excited by the synth sound. It was Manfred Mann's Earth Band Watch LP, for some reason thought harmless by the Soviet censors and issued by the state-owned Melodiya label. I had that LP as a present from mom, for my 11th or 12th birthday I think. It's a rather lame prog-rock record, but on side 2 there are two live covers: Martha's Madman and Dylan's Mighty Quinn. I still think they're incredible -- lengthy Moog and probably Yamaha CS80 freakouts, it was the sound I never heard before and I was absolutely flabbergasted, if that's the right word. Practically, it was the record that started my interest in music per se. And yes I still own a copy -- though now it's a CD:)The first time I thought about getting a synth was after I heard the first Pet Shop Boys album. Waht excited me, was that it was only two guys -- one singing, one playing. I liked the idea of such a partnership, but I could hardly afford any synth at the time (besides, there wasn't many on sale -- even Soviet-made ones were quite hard to find). I ended up in a punk/indie-band in a few years, when in college.

Ray Lynch's Celestial Soda Pop. I borrowed it from a friend in high school. The arpeggios and delay effects just freaked out my 13 year old brain. I even went so far as to copy it to a tape over and over again.

There were so many chart acts in the early eighties making great electronic music that it's hard to pinpoint a definitive influence. Although... :) seeing Thomas Dolby performing 'Windpower' on TOTP was pretty amazing, had never seen/heard anything like it before.

My father was always listening to "studio bands" in the late 70's, so I heard and gained an appreciation for synths and studio effects early on. But what really tuned me in was also Gary Numan's "Cars" (imagine that!). I was 5 (1980?), we were driving home from picking my mother up from work, and it came on the local AM radio station they were listening to, and even on AM it sounded new and fresh and otherworldly.

My father had something against male singers/pop stars that wore make-up, and unfortunately that tainted my vision for many years to come (but I was always fascinated by anyone, even standard rock bands, using anything electronic). It wasn't until DM's Violator and soon after, Front 242, that I seriously got interested again.

For me, it was The White Room by the KLF. I must have been 5 or 6 years old when I first heard it, and it's still an absolutely phenomenal electronic album.Fast-forward through a childhood of listening to stuff like The Orb, Underworld, Orbital and the like, I think the first time I ever truly wondered how it was actually created was when I listened to 'Play' by Moby. Many people seem to deride him but I seriously think 'play' is one of the most finely-crafted albums I've ever heard.

When I was 14, some friends were playing Skinny Puppy's "Rabies" CD and it was so unlike anything I had ever heard before I was just fascinated. I had been involved in music since age 8 starting with string bass, then tenor sax for a while and then guitar at age 12, and I could not comprehend this strange and bizarre music because I had no reference point for it. Soon after that, my mom got involved with a Columbia House get 12 CDs for a penny thing and asked me if I wanted anything. Skinny Puppy's "Last Rights" was the only thing on the list that interested me so I got that and it just blew my mind even more - so little of what was going on musically made sense to me that I just wanted to learn all I could. Some friends turned me onto freeware tracking programs like ScreamTracker and ImpulseTracker to make electronic music and I did my best to make chaotic industrial music using those for a few years before getting my first sampler at age 17.

It was so sonically radical, and it got to Number 5 in the UK singles chart. There was a moment in the early 80s in the UK where really odd-sounding songs - almost anti-songs - somehow got into the pop charts. Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" got to Number 2, and it's almost as weird.

For me, it was actually a movie that turned me onto pure electronic music. While I had been getting "into" synths by listening to early '80s progressive rock like Marillion, Twelfth Night, and Pallas, it wasn't until 1983 when I saw Michael Mann's movie The Keep (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keep_(film)) and heard the music of Tangerine Dream that I really discovered electronic music. I rushed out and picked up a copy of Tangerine Dream - Exit on vinyl and have never looked back.

The first song with synths that really struck me was "I, Robot" by The Alan Parsons Project. The first electronic music that brought me fully into that genre was the album 'Front by Front' by Front 242

The first actual song I can recall hearing in my youth and being able to relate name,artist and everything was "Welcome to the Machine" by Pink Floyd. Lets just say thats a hell of a way to start off a life that goes from a guitarist that played in blues, jazz, metal, and even christian bands up to later where a solo electronic musician ends up dropping hard psytrance.

...but the real credit goes to:

"Urbal Beats Vol. 1"

I had always noodled with keyboards and guitars. Up until that point I had been in several bands and music was very much an exploratory stage in my life. I'd spend whole paychecks on CDs and just randomly pick stuff out based on cover, reviews, word of mouth or anything since the internet was'nt much of a factor yet for music buyers. (ah the good ole days). I met a guy that was into raving and exposed me to Techno so the hunt perused after a night of partying. I came home with this CD one day and it just blew me away. I ended up buying everything I could find off the artists based on and around this CD, especially Prodigy and well.. along comes mangadrive.

I've never been one to say I'm really into 'this genre or that one' and can't give sole credit to any genre for influencing me the way late 90's techno did. A lot of my older friends that knew me as a metal guitarist don't really understand the change and you can't ever explain it to people, but that album really dropped the bomb on me. Combined with the fact I ended up with a 303 and misc drum machines before computer music took off because of this says a lot. The computer music just got more assessable and leaps and bounds better over the years.Now its just an everyday staple of my life.

Heard my Dad playing it and three days later started singing the chrous to 'My Jesus' so I asked my dad if I could borrow the album heard the opening title track with its Korg M1 'Beauty' Piano melody sent shivers up my neck....

my best friend's older sister used to love Duran Duran. we never really listened to them, but we liked to wind her up by calling the lead singer Simon Le Bum ! thinking we were very witty at the age of 9. it was 1983 and they had just released "7 and the Ragged Tiger"- the 2nd last track on the b-side was an instrumental called Tiger Tiger. we finally had a listen to it one day and were amazed. it was all synths and i had never heard anything like it before in my life. it was the start of something beautiful.

soon Depeche Mode and then Kraftwerk and onto all sorts of electronica goodies...

it was sometime in the early-to-mid 90's, and i used to be convinced that making music with electronics was somehow inferior to making music with classical or traditional instruments.

a friend of mine and i were debating whether or not good music could be created with electronic elements, and he brought up the argument that "a guitar will always sound like a guitar, but an electron can sound like anything." and since i had been listening to a lot of punk rock, he pulled out some industrial for me to listen to.